J.D. Salinger (1919-2010): An appreciation

[tonysam]

I thought this was a good piece about the late author and especially The Catcher in the Rye. It was published in today's World Socialist Web Site, of all places.

Snip:

The New York Times was fairly disparaging in its obituary, writing: “The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated….” This idea is elaborated in a piece written by the same author, Charles McGrath, for the Times just before Salinger’s 90th birthday last year: “In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose—much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of Franny and Zooey, still seems brilliant and fresh—but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness,” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was.”

The Times argument is emerging as something of a consensus: Holden Caulfield is not terribly relevant to the contemporary world. This reviewer takes objection to that verdict. The character is a creation of a particular time and place that helped shape his author. His significance, however, endures.

One suspects that those who question Holden’s relevance are seeking to justify and legitimize modern-day hypocrisy and cynicism. In other words, they are defending the outlook and lifestyles of the “phonies” that Caulfield so despised. After all, publications like Time and the New York Times have done no small amount of work in building up one of the biggest latter-day “phonies”—the one who is to be found presently in the Oval Office.

There is more to the novel than the contrast of duplicity and authenticity, as important as that theme is. One cannot easily bring to mind another popular work of post-war fiction with so many scenes that remain imprinted on the reader’s mind for decades after last reading the novel: Holden’s recollection of holding a girl’s hand in a movie, his anxiety that his boorish roommate may have assaulted a young woman, his encounter with a prostitute whom he pays but does not sleep with, and, above all, the scenes with his sister Phoebe that reveal a real closeness (reinforced, one imagines, by the shared tragedy of their brother’s childhood death from leukemia). The lasting impact of such scenes is bound up with the fact that Holden is an intriguing character with a wide range of emotions on display; it does not take the reader long to discover a vulnerable—even despondent—side to his generally defiant posture.

Much more

[lame54]

1. He has been a recluse for nearly 30 years...

and he has been writing that whole time

it is going to be interesting the wealth of material he has

[tonysam]

2. I am looking forward to any works he has written during his last decades. n/t